Smells Like Teen Panic
by FreeloveZilpha
Summary: A little panic on Mike Newton’s part explains his enthusiasm for getting to know Isabella Swan upon her arrival to Forks HS.


**A/N: It seems only fair, if one reads others' work, to offer something oneself. Here's a first EVER piece of creative writing from me--unless you count those grade school stories. **

**I always wondered what might be the motivation for some minor characters' behaviors. . . .  
**

**Mike Newton POV**

I checked my watch. It was 8:10; less than an hour before I could close up shop and go home. I was putting overstock on the tall shelves to the back of the store. Newton's, my family's sporting goods store, was in what used to be the hardware store a century ago. Hardwood floors and high tin ceiling gave it a solid, established feel. It was a cool old building in other ways, too. We'd kept the old front doors and their worn brass handles, and the rolling ladder that moved along the far well along the row of shelves.

Right now, I was on the top wrung of said ladder, stacking winter-weight sleeping bags up to the ceiling. Spring was coming, so I was making room down below for lighter gear.

Up here, it smelled like goose down, dust, and the rubber that was used for playground balls. We went through a million playground balls that every child used for four square, and now, the newly re-popularized dodgeball. We kept all of them up here. One too many errant balls, thrown by some show-off kid, had knocked a display, and my dad went ballistic (once the customers left, of course). So, now all of the deep red balls were safely tucked away, seventeen feet off the ground and kids had to ask for them. I looked along the row of blood red balls and smelled the rubber again. It was a comforting smell that reminded me of elementary school.

I took a deep breath and caught the whiff of something else—mildew. Looking around I didn't see anything. I tilted my head back and looked straight up. Sure enough, the paint on the ceiling just above my head was bubbled. There must be a leak in the roof. I'd have to tell my dad. He'd wonder how I noticed it, though. I reached up, scraping the damp paint off a 2-inch patch just above my head. It looked convincingly like someone had, say, slid a box across the ceiling and caught the spot on the edge of the box, pulling the damp paint off. That would explain it.

Such maneuvers were always necessary. No one knew I was a freak; I hid it well. No one in Forks would guess I could smell better than most dogs. No one would want to know—who wouldn't be creeped out spending time with someone who could identify your toothpaste or soap brand just by standing next to you?

"Oh, Michael!" someone called, jolting me out of my thoughts. I looked down and behind me.

It was Mrs. Cope. Again. Buying more stuff—this time, softball gear, apparently—for her rather rather uncoordinated 13-year-old daughter, Mary.

"Good evening, Mrs. Cope!" I said with enthusiasm as I slid down the ladder like a fireman—a trick I'd mastered after many, many boring nights in the store. The secretary really was a nice woman. Reaching the floor, I turned and walked toward them.

"Mary," I said, nodding to the brunette in a puffy pink down coat that I had sold her in October.

They smelled like McDonalds. Mrs. Cope always smelled like Jean Nate cologne and hairspray, but right now, the smell of French fries was overwhelming. They must have eaten in the car—food smells were always intensified by confined spaces. At least these two never smelled of cigarettes, or booze. Or sex for that matter. Mrs. Cope was a divorcee, and I was completely confident that she didn't have any action on the side.

Mrs. Cope was aptly named. She coped with pain-in-the-butt teenagers in the principal's office at Forks High School during the day, and tried to engage her shy daughter in something other than books when she wasn't working. She didn't do anything but look after teenagers. I felt kinda sorry for her.

She beamed as she walked alongside me, holding a new Wilson softball and some Adidas socks. "I was just telling Mary here that you'd be the perfect person to help us find a mitt for her."

Mary looked at me with a familiar expression: half mortification at her mother's sheer existence, half eagerness. Jessica Stanley was always telling me that Mary had a crush on me. Maybe. She did smell a little nervous. Maybe I was just the only guy she knew that spoke to her. I tended to think Mary got ignored a lot.

"Happy to, Mrs. Cope," I said, putting on my friendly-and-helpful face. I turned to her daughter, now staring at her scruffed up pink Uggs whose edges were a splattered gray from the Forks slush outside.

"Are you a rightie or a leftie, Mary?"

Mary turned beet red. You'd think I'd asked her about sports bras, she was so flustered. As her mother moved away to the next rack to browse, Mary relaxed a bit. She wasn't a bad kid. We started over toward the soft- and baseball section of the store. I caught a hint of coconut. Hair product, probably.

While Mary tried on gloves and looked at price tags, Mrs. Cope joined us and started her usual freestyle Forks high school chatter.

"Did you know that Chief Swan's daughter, Isabella, starts tomorrow, Mike?"

"Um, no, I didn't," I sort of mumbled absentmindedly as I swapped a glove for Mary. I chuckled silently as I wondered if Isabella had a mustache like the Chief. Having never seen Isabella's mom, I could only imagine her looking like her dad. "I wonder if she fishes," I mused to myself, chortling just a bit.

"Well, you be nice to her, " Mrs. Cope admonished. "It's not easy to start mid-semester, poor thing. It can make all the difference if just one person makes an effort." Mrs. Cope reached into her bag and grabbed piece of gum. Dentyne cinnamon, I noted from the tang that filled the air as she bit down.

A mitt, mitt oil, and a Mariner's cap later, I slid Mrs. Cope's check under the cash drawer and closed the register.

"Ur, um, thanks, Mike," Mary said cautiously.

"No problem, Mary. Come back if you need some help breaking in the mitt."

"Thank you, Michael. See you tomorrow, dear. And don't forget about Isabella," Mrs. Cope called, pointing her finger at me. Mary ducked her head and scuttled out the door with her mom, the bell on the front door tinkling softly to announce their departure.

I smelled rain on the sidewalk as the door whooshed shut.

I made a mental note to steer clear of the Swan girl tomorrow. The last thing I wanted was to be saddled with trying to help some pitiful mustached girl try to fit in. I had a tenuous position in the school as it was. I was good at sports but too small now in high school to be really competitive. "I'll nevva be a contenda," I Brandoed in my head, chuckling bitterly.

Sighing, I looked at the clock: 8:40. Only twenty minutes to go until closing. I turned my attention to moving sale shirts onto the round hanging rack near back of the store. They smelled like starch and plastic hangers. Putting the sale items at the back drew people into the store, so the theory went—put what people want near the back and then they have to walk past all the new merch to see the sales items.

"Everyone's always looking for a bargain!" my dad chirped constantly.

Everyone, that is, except the Cullens. They _never_ shopped the sale rack. Stupid rich kids. Well, not stupid. Alice and Edward were really smart. Annoying rich smart people. They were a family relatively new to Forks. Five kids roughly my age: Jasper, Emmett, and Edward, Alice and Rosalie. All built, all good-looking, all straight-A students. Their adoptive dad was a doctor at the hospital. They were standoffish and proud, and a little weird. Everyone swooned over them, though, because they were the only "beautiful people" to grace Forks in centuries.

Oddly, they didn't smell like most people. The predominant Cullen smell—for all of them, which was also weird in itself—was chalk. Even outside of classrooms with blackboards, they smelled slightly like rocks or gravel or something. Clearly, they never ate fast food. In fact they never smelled like food at all, which was puzzling. I would testify in court that they didn't cook meat; that was too strong a scent to ever get rid of. I always knew who had roast beef for dinner before coming into the store.

My gut told me that the Cullens were vegetarians. They certainly were pale enough. Why they would keep that a secret, I had no idea. Probably part of their "let's blend in here, in this podunk Washington town, even though we're supermodel gorgeous, rich, and can speak five languages."

I snorted at the ludicrousness of the Cullens fitting in. Their politics were super-liberal for this area, too. Rumor had it that four of the kids were couples that slept together in the parents' house. Granted, they were adopted, but still. Freelove in Forks. Who would've thought?

The Cullens were always also supporting "save the forest" campaigns, even though logging was huge in the local economy. Their house, I heard, was full of expensive art and furniture, too. Dr. and Mrs. Cullen seemed more like lefty professors from Yale than rural Pacific northwesters.

The Cullen kids were all so good looking that it almost seemed—worries of incest aside—like they had to be with one another simply because mere mortals would feel so pathetic and inadequate next to them. They made me nervous, just a little bit, because if I were honest, there was something about them that was nothing like "chalky."

Last year, I thought I had a crush on Alice. She'd been in my Latin class, and she wound up sitting next to me. For a whole semester, I tried to puzzle out the scent that hid beneath the otherwise stony aura she gave off. It was alluring and inviting. Sugary and "outdoorsy" were the only words I could find for it, which was an odd combo. I found myself leaning toward her unintentionally. If I were _completely_ honest, I'd say it caused me on more than one occasion to hit the men's room after class to quickly take care of business. At least I knew that other guys were having similar problems. Believe me, I didn't want to smell spunk in the locker room, but I did, and it was usually after someone had a class with Rosalie Hale. I shuddered at the thought for more than one reason.

Yeah, so the men's room. Embarrassing, but not out of the ordinary for a guy my age. Perfectly normal.

I snapped out of that memory as the bell on the front door jingled again. It was Edward, alone. I waited for the others to show—they seemed to travel as a pack—but the door closed firmly without further disturbance. He walked casually past the front displays of tennis gear.

A voice in my head whined "Not fair!" as he walked by. I could see why every girl in school wanted him—and he was pretty much the opposite of me: tall, confident, dangerous looking. Even his hair was something girls gushed about. My straight, dorky hair was nothing compared to his apparently. Girls thought I was cute, not good looking, and if anyone else called me "sweet" this week, I was going to lose it. And where I had to work at it—and my dad never got off my case—Cullen seemed naturally built and athletic. It really wasn't fair. I do know he ran a lot, at least; he went through Nikes faster than anyone in town.

"Hey, Cullen, " I said with some caution. The guy was a little intimidating. And chalky, as usual. "Looking for something in particular?"

"Mike. Hi," he responded, running a hand through his bronze hair. Messing with his hair didn't seem a pose but rather a nervous tick. Huh. Weird.

He walked up to the mitt racks to my right. I was selling a lot lately.

"I'm looking for a catcher's mitt," he said with a slight rush to his voice.

"Are you a righ—?" I started to ask.

"I catch right handed, but I'm actually looking for a left-handed glove" he said, apologetically. I guess it was a predictable question, but it was like he saw it coming and felt bad interrupting. Weird again.

"It's for my mother. Hers wore out," he added, in way of explanation.

What 30-something mom wore out a catcher's mitt? I wondered to myself.

"Well, we have some Wilsons that just came in," I replied. "Small enough for a woman's hand." I took a few steps forward and leaned past him to reach a mitt hanging just above his head. Taking one breath, I instantly made a little chirp-cough. He smelled sweet and leafy, too—like Alice, only stronger. What the hell was that smell? It was like walking into a room full of exotic grass clippings. I'd say "like a meadow," but there weren't any meadows in Forks. It was herbal and musky and citrusy and rich. It wasn't cologne, though. It was too organic smelling. Good smelling—_really _good smelling. Like good enough to make me —

Within a second, Cullen stiffened and hurriedly grabbed another mitt. Two minutes later, he'd paid $160 for an Akadema glove and had almost literally run out of the store.

My dad was thrilled with the sale. "Good work, kid!" he exclaimed, clapping me on the back in the coach-y way he always had with me in the store.

"He knew what he wanted, that's for sure," I answered, feeling a little sick.

I didn't want to complete the thought that was running through my head just moments ago. Cullen smelled good enough that I almost leaned my nose toward his neck to get a gigantic gulp of scent. What the hell? Thank god he'd left the store so quickly. I couldn't have stayed to help him if he'd browsed. Not because I felt slightly nauseate, which I did, but because I had had the beginnings of what I'd call some serious wood.

The hell? I didn't bat for that team, as far as I knew. But something about Cullen's scent grabbed me the way Alice's had. It had reverberated through my entire body. I'd wanted to put my face to his neck. Kiss him? I wondered as panic gripped my chest.

Once home, the store locked up and my car in the garage for the evening, the feeling started to subside. I couldn't wrap my head around what had happened, and I didn't want to try.

The next morning, I showered, shaved, and went down for breakfast.

"Good morning, sweetie, " my mom said with a solicitous nod. "Pancakes?"

The normalcy of pancakes and bacon settled my nerves a bit. It had been a dreamless night, and for that I was thankful: no wet dreams about Edward Cullen's neck, at least. I hadn't resolved my problem, however. What was wrong with me?

That feeling stayed with me throughout my drive to school and the walk down the hallway past the Principal's office. I waved at Mrs. Cope through the glass wall. I just about squeaked like a girl when, turning the corner toward my locker I almost ran smack into Edward Cullen again. He was just closing his locker, his books slung under his arm against his muscular hip.

What was I doing thinking about his hips!?!

I remembered that scent, hoping to catch it again, hoping not to at the same time. He'd been so close in the store, he'd drawn me like a magnet—

The 5-minute bell rang and the rest of the Cullen tribe walked in behind us, bringing me back to the present.

They headed toward their lockers against the east wall. Calm, cool, and collected. I felt like spastic Munchkin next to them all.

I saw that Alice and Jasper were wearing the Patagonia I'd sold them last season. They must just have gotten back from their most recent camping trip. Along with the clothes, I'd sold them a ton of gear and they had spent most of this week out of school on a hiking trip in Juniper Dunes Wilderness. The Cullens were always taking quick camping trips. Now that I thought about it, they doubled up the camping with the environmental conference in Seattle.

'Hey," Emmett said casually as they walked past me, each giving me friendly but reserved nods. I nodded back, trying to look just as casual.

I smelled their stony smell. They were too far away for anything more subtle, thank goodness. But just as they'd moved past me, the air thrummed with a scent I'd never noticed on them before.

Sometimes, I caught a strand off of their clothes, like leather or new denim, but that wasn't it. This was slightly acrid and musky—warm, even. And, like the chalkiness, it seemed to radiate from all of them. It was familiar, but hard to place. Food? They never smelled like food. Gasoline? Rosalie often smelled like motor oil from working on cars (which was totally hot). Dirt? Sometimes, I could smell when people had been gardening before coming to the store.

And then it registered: I'd smelled this smell on every man who wore camo in the fall. They smelled like deer season. Fur. They smelled like dead animals.

The Cullens smelled like animals? That was totally crazy. Why in the heck—

"You've got to me kidding me," I thought. For all their hemp-wearing, tree-hugging, whale-saving appearances, those hypocrites were hunters?! They killed things? No wonder the long camping trips! No wonder their odd attitude in the store. A sense of relief inexplicitly swept through me. The Cullens weren't so perfect after all. I couldn't wait to tell my dad.

And just as that thought came to me, Edward brushed past me. And I forgot everything in my head except that green, lickable smell. My head spun, literally and figuratively, following his back as he turned toward his brother. I surreptitiously sniffed his wake.

And there it was. Holy mother of home runs, that scent. It was like a gentle cloud. And there went my cock like I was watching one of Mr. Yorkie's porno DVDs. What was happening to me _again_? I didn't do guys. I didn't even like the Cullens. I was never interested in Jessica's Chippendale playing cards or the gay porn on Showtime. I wanted to bolt. I wanted to cry. I wanted to not feel this way. I looked up, anxious, and noticed that the Cullens had moved on, ambling toward their homerooms.

I was doused in relief and lust at the same time. What the frack was I supposed to do now? I could feel my breathing shallow out and my heart race. I could also feel my cock pressing against my zipper. Right this minute, there was no way was I running into the locker room to pound it, not with first-period gym guys changing for class.

But where the frack was I gonna go? What if I bumped into Cullen next period and it happened again? The bile rose in my throat as it had last night and I swallowed it down.

I could feel the sweat beading on my forehead and in my armpits. The salty saliva in my mouth pooled in a disgusting way.

And then my eyes shifted across the hallway to a slightly hunched figure in front of the trophy case. It was a doe eyed brunette with milky skin and a self-deprecating frown. Her head was ducked down a bit, and she seemed to watch the ground carefully as she walked. Clearly not a jock. I'd never seen her before.

This must be Isabella Swan, the new girl. She's beautiful and I'm not the only one to notice; I could tell by the way the other guys standing around were looking at her. In that instant, I decided one thing: I would not be attracted to fracking Edward Cullen. No way. The girl before me was all I'd ever need. I wanted her to be my girlfriend. I wanted all the other guys to back off. I wanted to show everyone that I was in love with this beautiful girl. All I had to do was get her to go out with me, make her see that I was good boyfriend material.

If I had Isabella Swan, all this stuff with Edward Cullen would disappear—that was just the reaction of being a horny but virginal teenager. I just need to focus on her, get her, get all this other other stuff behind me. Starting today. Starting with introducing myself and being the kind of guy I am—a nice guy that isn't stuck up like the Cullens. A nice, normal guy.

As I thought that, the panic in my chest subsided. Yes, I could do this. Isabella Swan was bound to be in one of my classes, and if she wasn't, well, I'd catch her tomorrow morning before homeroom. I could do this. Edward Cullen, had nothing on me. There's nothing that special about him. I could do this. I just needed Isabella Swan.

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**Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought--I'm always eager for feedback! --FLZ**


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